human ecology

The study of the relationships between individuals, social groups, and their social environments . Systematic study of human (or, as it is sometimes termed, ‘social’) ecology was initiated by Robert Park and the other Chicago sociologists who applied concepts taken from plant and animal ecology in their development of urban ecology .

In its later forms (see, Human Ecology, 1950) human ecology rejects any simple application to human societies of the competitive and evolutionary mechanisms by which biologists explain the distribution of species in varying physical environments. Instead it is ‘a logical extension of the system of thought and the techniques of investigation developed in the study of the collective life of lower organisms to the study of man’. This involves examining how human groups produce particular patterns of social relationships when adapting to their environment. Adaptation exhibits basic characteristics thought to be inherent properties of any social system : namely, human interdependence, and functionally differentiated social institutions, including dominant institutions performing certain key functions. Under normal circumstances social change is limited to that required to restore equilibrium conditions. Ecologists such as Hawley sought ecological explanations of human behaviour and culture as well as of spatial patterns (see his The Changing Shape of Metropolitan America, 1955, and Urban Society, 1971).

Human ecology is often claimed as a general approach, useful for the study of social life in a variety of disciplines, including social anthropology, human geography, and urban economics. Its direct influence on contemporary sociological thought is limited, although its has obvious affinities with structural-functional theory, notably in its emphasis on the adaptive mechanisms by which social equilibrium is maintained, seeing these as an inevitable basis for social existence, and largely discounting the more radical possibilities for social change occurring through human agency. See also urban ecology.